HEAVY MUSIC HISTORY: The Satanist — Behemoth

Evangelion (2009) should’ve been BEHEMOTH’s watershed moment. Starting with 2004’s Demigod, and strengthened by 2007’s The Apostasy, BEHEMOTH were no longer Poland’s resident black metal noisemakers; they were arguably one of blackened death metal’s most consistently creative acts. 

Conquer All sowed the seed, a black-leaning death metal ditty with soaring solos and an appreciation for malicious melodies. At The Left Hand Ov God’s shamanic chanting and eardrum-obliterating vocals took it a step further. And with Evangelion, they had landed on Ov Fire And The Void; a song designed to audibly capture the spirit of Dionysus, god of ecstatic chaos, which ultimately became their calling card for years to come.

However, Evangelion was swallowed by the shadow of two significant events. Firstly, In March 2010, mere months on from the album’s release, vocalist and guitarist Nergal was held on trial, the first of many run-ins with the Polish judicial system, on blasphemy charges for publicly denouncing the Catholic church whilst ripping a bible up on stage in 2007. 

Secondly, on 8th August 2010, Nergal was rushed to the haematology ward of Gdańsk Medical University Hospital, and was diagnosed with Leukaemia two weeks later. All of BEHEMOTH’s tours were cancelled, with the initial diagnosis suggesting it was far too advanced for chemotherapy (which later proved false). Approaching his time in hospital like a soldier sent off to war — admitting in his 2012 memoir Confessions Of A Heretic that “it was not a hospital, but more a front line — he spent his time tucked up in hospital beds working on BEHEMOTH’s Evangelia Heretika live DVD. He would later tell Dom Lawson for The Guardian that “this was the most important experience in my life” and “I’m mentally, physically and spiritually a much stronger individual now. Sickness is a sign and it happens to us for a reason. You know what? I probably needed it.” 

Despite some battling back and forth in early 2011, in March, Nergal emerged from Uniwersyteckie Centrum Kliniczne Hospital a new man. Before burrowing away at both Hertz Studio and RG Studio for five months between February and June 2013, the band — completed by bassist Orion and drummer Inferno — would complete a comeback tour that saw them headline Bloodstock Open Air in 2012.

Of course, from Nergal’s all-clear, it would take nearly three years for BEHEMOTH to birth Evangelion’s follow-up, yet the wait was undoubtedly worth it, for The Satanist (2014) would go on to eclipse any and all watershed moments its predecessor might’ve mustered. And so it goes, Evangelion walked so The Satanist could run.

Hailed universally as a modern masterpiece of both black and death metal, The Satanist would eclipse all BEHEMOTH had achieved previously. Describing it as “a majestic and vital (re)statement of intent”, Revolver regarded it as one of 25 essential black metal albums; and Metal Hammer’s Dayal Patterson retrospectively declared it as “the greatest extreme metal album of the 21st century”. The Satanist pushed the boundaries of coverage for an extreme metal act, reaching as far as the outer limits of the mainstream music journalism zeitgeist, where Pitchfork proclaimed it as “a terrific coil of most everything BEHEMOTH have ever done well, a strangely hopeful vision of hell wrested away from its very grip”. 

In his review, Grayson Haver Currin would surmise opener Blow Your Trumpets Gabriel as BEHEMOTH’s choice to return with something “that’s as vile and startling as most any moment in their previously impious two decades”. Whereas Evangelion’s opener Daimonos was suffocatingly dense, Blow Your Trumpets Gabriel is as much a multi-layered organism as the Earth, given space to breathe amongst crystal clear production. As Nergal growls out every single syllable of the opening verse with such venom and vile you’d be forgiven for assuming he’s taken the form of a snake — “I saw the virgin’s cunt spawning forth the snake” alone says it all — it’s clear that The Satanist is as dark as BEHEMOTH have ever been, a tongue-in-cheek trip through the void that only suffering from, and surviving, a disease like Leukaemia could yield. 

In an interview for Consequence Heavy, ahead of 2018’s I Loved You At Your Darkest, Nergal reflected on The Satanist, claiming that he “knew for a fact that I’m no immortal, and that there might not be another BEHEMOTH album after, so we just gave it all we could”. But that’s only scratching the surface of what they did; Leukemia, in some shape or form, gave BEHEMOTH, and subsequently The Satanist, a new-found sense of musical and narrative pacing. 

“I’m not trying to discredit things we’ve done in the past, but what differs from other records is the level of consciousness behind it” Nergal assessed in 2014 with The Guardian’s Dom Lawson, and rightfully so. Furor Divinus roars with the scorn of The Lion King’s Scar; Messe Noire floats endlessly through the cosmos, stabbing riffs and blackhole blast-beats emphasising turbulence; and Ora Pro Nobis Lucifer lures you in with melodies made for lullabies, before spin-kicking into a blackened punk-and-roll punch-up. 

Elsewhere, the title track lives and breathes like a world-carrying turtle swimming through the universe, perfectly soundtracking the narrator’s descent from Mount Sinai, as In The Absence Ov Light fades out into soft jazz saxophones and spoken-word. And lest we forget the triumphant finale O Father O Satan O Sun!, a towering 7-minute monolith that is ritualistically shamanic in nature, yet lacks none of BEHEMOTH’s trademark bite. 

It’s impossible to experience The Satanist in any other way but from start to finish. This is a journey, there’s no two ways about it. Considering Nergal’s personal experiences, it’s hard not to hear lines as poetically poignant as “like a day without the dawn, like a ray void ov the sun, like a storm that brings no calm; I’m most complete yet so undone” without connecting the dots. Yet, The Satanist, in its purest form, is an album about transformation. Sure, it leans into their anti-religion antagonism, but it’s a foil for a far bigger message, as Pitchfork put it: “in spite of its title and tone, ultimately feels less about “bit[-ing] the withered hand of God” than besting the odds and avoiding the comfort of conformity.”

Conformity is the optimal word in where BEHEMOTH went next. After saying au revoir to THE SATANIST in style following 2016’s show stopping special guest appearance playing the album in its entirety at Bloodstock Open Air, 2018’s I Loved You At Your Darkest would completely flip the script for their most accessible and melodic offering yet, before delving into the darkest corners of the void for 2022’s Opvs Contra Natvram, which he surmised to this author in 2022 contextually as “[the world] is a very dark fucking cloud lingering around us nowadays, and this album is the fucking juice that I sucked out of those clouds and put into a piece of plastic…”.

They’ve since headlined countless festivals, brought extreme metal to U.K. and European arenas supporting SLIPKNOT, and continue to create seismic waves in the way blackened death metal, no, extreme metal music, is made. Beyond its accolades, and its artistry though, lies a far simpler truth, one which underpins The Satanist, and all BEHEMOTH do, as Nergal once told this writer “it’s not just another record; it’s a piece of my fucking liver, it’s a piece of my lung, it’s a piece of me that I tear out from my chest and I just fucking hand it to you.”

 

The Satanist was originally released on February 3 2014 via Nuclear Blast.

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